That sick F*&^^% should have hung five minutes after he plead guilty. I can't believe we house sick F*$&'s for sixteen years then put them down. I wonder how much it cost us taxpayers to take care of these killers. I hope the families get closure now knowing that SOB is gone. They should have put him in the room with the fathers of those kids and it probably would have taken sixteen seconds not sixteen years.

atlfootr

10-25-2006, 10:02 PM

By DREW HARWELL (dharwell@alligator.org)
Alligator Writer

[ (http://www.tmcowners.com/teamtalk/061023p_gatorwood.php)

They were first built to house students off campus, but 16 years ago they became crime scenes. Now, these three apartment buildings - Gatorwood Apartments, Williamsburg Village Apartments and a duplex on Southwest 24th Avenue - serve as unmarked memorials to five lives cut short by Danny Rolling's knife.

Williamsburg Village, an apartment buildings - Gatorwood Apartments, Williamsburg Village Apartments and a duplex on Southwest 24th Avenue - serve as unmarked memorials to five lives cut short by Danny Rolling's knife.

Williamsburg Village, an apartment complex at 2000 SW 16th St., was the site of Rolling's first Gainesville killings. On Aug. 23, 1990, Rolling followed two UF freshmen - Christina Powell, 17, and Sonja Larson, 18 - to their Williamsburg Village townhouse. He approached their apartment late at night and climbed up an old, wooden staircase to their back door. The door was unlocked.

After he entered, he stabbed Larson to death and raped and murdered Powell. Val Peters, the complex's regional manager, said the complex installed security alarms and stronger deadbolt locks in every apartment soon after the bodies were discovered.
The complex, which was built in 1968 and still stands today, is favored by some medical students because of its proximity to Shands at UF. Students in scrubs can usually be seen leaving the 128-unit complex.

Larson and Powell's apartment was No. 113, a townhouse-style one near the rear of the complex. The two-story apartment has a living room, dining room and kitchen on the first floor, and the two bedrooms are upstairs. The back stairwell, which Danny Rolling used to enter the apartment, faces a chain-link fence separating the apartments from woods.

After the murders, room No. 113 was rented to a brother and sister who were told of the room's ghastly history, Peters said. Since the siblings moved out in 1993, the room has been uninhabited. Staff now use it as a model room because they said doing so was easier than trying to rent it out.

Rolling committed his next murder at a duplex located at 3533 SW 24th Ave. On Aug. 25, 1990, he pried the duplex's sliding glass door open with a screwdriver. Because the sliding glass door had no security bar, it opened easily.

Rolling crept into the khaki-colored apartment and waited for SFCC student Christa Hoyt to enter. When she did, he raped and murdered her. In a lawsuit filed by Hoyt's parents in 1991, Elbert J. Hoover, the duplex's landlord and a building contractor, was charged with not doing enough to secure their child's apartment.

Gatorwood Apartments recently became the site of practice burns for the Gainesville Fire Department.
According to the suit, Hoover failed to
install a strong lock on the sliding glass door
reinforce the sliding glass door with a security bar
provide a security system and good outside lighting
keep trees and bushes trimmed around the back of the duplex
secure the gate to Hoyt's privacy fenceCrime-scene photos showed that a chain-link fence on the side of the duplex was bent and unstable. The sliding glass door lock hung loosely on the side of the door.

Hoover settled the lawsuit by giving the Hoyt family $350,000.
Hoover declined to comment for this article.

Rolling's final murders occurred about a mile away from Hoyt's duplex. This time, he chose Gatorwood Apartments, a 240-unit complex at 2337 SW Archer Road.

To get into No. 1203, a ground-floor apartment, he used the same screwdriver he had used before. He forced the sliding glass door open at about 3 a.m. on Aug. 27, 1990 and murdered Tracy Paules and Manuel Taboada.

After the killings, Gatorwood officials offered to install new locks for any resident who requested them. Police checked the identification of everyone entering the complex.

Gatorwood is abandoned now, though the skeletons of some of the buildings still stand. Foram Group Inc., the firm that manages the property, closed the complex in November 2004.

In June, city commissioners unanimously approved the company's plan to build a four-story apartment complex on the 10-acre site. The planned "luxury" complex will have 100 more units than Gatorwood.

Construction is scheduled to begin in several months, and the apartments are scheduled to open for residents by summer 2008.
For now, Alachua County Fire Rescue, Gainesville Fire Rescue and the Community Emergency Response Team are using the apartments for training, according to an Alachua County press release.

The response team officers have practiced search-and-rescue operations in what was once the complex's clubhouse, and parts of the complex have been set ablaze to train firefighters.